SEO + Product Marketing = a blueprint for brand building

3 lessons for SEOs from product marketing

Nov 25, 2024

A warm welcome to 134 new Growth Memo readers who joined us last week! If you haven’t subscribed yet, join the ranks of Amazon, Microsoft, Google and 15,000 other Growth Memo readers.

Turn your blog into your biggest sales engine.

How? Focus on high-impact SEO strategies that target the most profitable opportunities.

North Star Inbound has a proven track record of creating top-converting blog pages that deliver

thousands of leads,
hundreds of thousands in directly-attributed revenue,
and rapid payback periods on SEO spend.

They focus on the 10% of pages with the highest ROI for your brand. Basically, your content becomes your most effective sales tool.

There’s no better way to loosen tight budgets than to grow revenue quickly.

Intrigued? Learn more here

Having a strong brand makes everything in SEO easier. Brands have better user signals on their sites, better click-through rates in the SERPs, and get preferential treatment from Google. Google’s algorithms elevate sites with strong brand signals and punish companies that are too aggressive about SEO without having “the engine” to back it up.

There is a common belief that SEO can’t do much about the brand, but that’s wrong. We often simply miss the tools. Product Marketing skills and insights can significantly improve the impact of organic traffic and support brand building in the process.

Both disciplines sit between product development and customer needs. Both work on content, audience understanding and driving revenue - but from different angles. Together, they can amplify each other. It’s an opportunity most companies miss, to their detriment.

One key lesson is to think long-term about brand impact. Focusing on the user’s value helps create a stronger brand connection, which pays off over time. It’s about building trust and loyalty that translates into sustained engagement and recognition. - Bar Wolf

I spoke with 5 seasoned product marketing experts about their lessons from decades in the field to distill what SEOs can learn from product marketing:

Lauren (Hobbs) Decker, snr consultant at Carema and former VP Brand & Product Marketing at G2
Bar Wolf, Product Marketing at Wix
Blake Thorne, Head of Marketing at Govly
Dirk Schart, GTM & Growth executive at PTC
Sol Masch, Group VP Product at WebMD

Product Marketing tools and frameworks for SEOs

Product marketing and SEO are highly complementary. They can unify customer research and quantitative insights for better prioritization and impact measuring. They can uplevel user experience with the right messaging. And, they can improve the quality of traffic with clear differentiation.

It makes sense: The goal of product marketing is to help the product organization bring the product to market with market research, positioning & messaging, go-to-market strategy, customer education, and sales enablement. While SEOs research keywords and analyze search volumes, product marketers spend a lot of time talking to customers.

Traffic is great, but what makes people remember your product? - Blake Thorne

Lesson 1: Improve content with customer insights

When product marketers and SEO teams collaborate early and often, they enable the audience to find relevant content that addresses their specific challenges and needs — making marketing efforts more efficient and effective. - Lauren Hobbs Decker

You will surely agree that customer insights are critical for any form of marketing. In my work with high-performing tech companies, however, I often notice that marketing teams have no idea where to find customer research and they don’t have open channels to existing customers. The results of performance marketing, including paid and organic search, made it too attractive to focus on metrics. The solution is to either collaborate with product marketing to learn from customer insights or get them yourself.

Product marketers get customer insights through:

1on1 interviews
Surveys
Focus groups
Reviews
Customer support / sales

They look for:

Pain points
Motivations
Expectations

Good questions to ask:

"What challenges are you currently facing in [specific area related to the product's value]?"
"How are you currently addressing this challenge, and what do you like or dislike about your current solution?"
"When evaluating solutions for this challenge, what are the most important factors you consider?"
"Have you considered making changes to your current approach? If so, what’s holding you back?"
"What would convince you that a new solution is worth exploring or investing in?"

Some of my favorite customer feedback tools:

Other opportunities for insights:

Analyze reviews on g2.com
Product analytics data from Amplitude or Mixpanel
Insights from sales, product and customer success / support teams
Analyze the positioning and messaging of key competitors

SEOs can use customer insights to:

Create product landing pages or category pages (in e-commerce) for uses cases and features and competitor comparison pages like ahrefs.com/vs for perceived competitors
Build lead-gen tools or quizzes based on most common customer problems and questions
Generate content for pain points mentioned in interviews that might not have “search volume” but are searched by your target audience

Use the wording of customers / prospects and embed quotes in content
Addressing common pain points and expectations in content
Prioritizing topics and keywords on the roadmap (instead of by search volume only)
Inform content length and the level of detail
Incorporate product-tested messaging into meta titles and descriptions

Tip: AI tools can process large volumes of data from customer reviews, surveys, or social media to identify pain points, motivations, and trends faster than traditional methods.

I so often land on a website via SEO and can see a very strong SEO program at play, but I’m not left with any impression of what the company actually does. For many SEOs this moment might be “mission accomplished,” they’ve got their rankings and traffic. This is where brand and product marketers can step in and work alongside SEOs to augment the experience on that page - what makes people remember the product? What makes people know the brand and have a positive sentiment even if the initial visit is short? - Blake Thorne

Lesson 2: Send stronger user signals with clearer differentiation

Since the DoJ lawsuit against Google and the ranking factor leak, we officially know that Google uses user signals to a high degree. In my Memos, I often highlight the importance of a good user experience on top of high-quality content to impact user signals. Differentiation can top it off by offering another lens for topic/keyword prioritization besides search volume and difficulty. The deep market and customer understanding of product marketing helps SEOs understand where a company stands out and where competition is tough.

Differentiation is how a company stands out with unique features and value. In my guide to building a winning SEO strategy, I explain that an absolutely essential component of any strategy is strong differentiation:

Critical: the approach needs to be differentiated. You need to do things differently (competitive advantage or asymmetry). You cannot expect to do the same things as your competitors and beat them. That’s just a way to end up in attrition warfare and obsession with operational efficiency. Differentiation creates greater value, prices and margins.

For clear differentiation, you need to deeply understand 3 things: the market, alternatives, and customers. Figure out what problems customers are trying to solve, the options at their disposal, and the impact that solving those problems has on their business/life. You can use interviews and review platforms like G2 or Trustpilot to source insights.

The way most SEOs measure “the market” is by looking at competitors ranking for the same keywords. That is a good start - and valuable for product marketers - but it needs to go further. SEOs should also factor in “perceived competitors”, ie what alternatives does the customer have in mind, which product marketers can bring to the table.

“Different is better than better.” - Dirk Schart

Good differentiation is very specific and makes it easy for customers to understand the value they get from your product.

There are 3 outcomes from differentiation work:

Positioning Statements: a clear articulation of how the product fits into the market, who it serves, and why it’s better or different. See an example from Slack: “Making work simpler, more pleasant and more productive.”
Value Propositions: Statements that highlight the key benefits and outcomes customers can expect, tailored to specific customer needs or segments. In the example of Slack, again “Streamline communication, reduce emails, and increase productivity”
Messaging Frameworks: A spreadsheet covering the product's unique features and benefits, broken down by audience segments, use cases, or buyer personas.

SEOs should incorporate differentiation factors into content briefs to influence the tone, sub-topics, meta titles, headings and CTAs on any page on the site.

In the YMYL/Health space that WebMD participates in, trust from consumers is paramount. According to a recent Harris Poll study, 1 in 3 Americans don’t know whether the health information they read online and on social platforms is truthful or if the source is being paid to promote things, and ultimately they can’t determine what’s true and what’s false. WebMD prides itself on editorial integrity - advertisers have zero influence on our editorial content, and all of our content is fact-checked by medical professionals for accuracy. Moreover, our medical reviewers audit all of our content frequently to ensure that months/years after the content is published it’s updated as necessary to stay accurate even as medical research & science evolve. In part, these efforts contribute to WebMD being the most recognized and trusted name in online health - we've earned our trust over the past 25 years and have become a household name for quality health information. - Sol Masch

Lesson 3: Drive better traffic with strong positioning and messaging

Obviously, driving traffic is not enough. It needs to be the right kind of traffic. Good positioning and messaging can make the difference because it can act as a lens for topic/keyword prioritization.

Messaging can elevate the user experience by showing the copy on landing pages on other types of content that highlight how and why the product is a good fit.

The goal of positioning is to define how a product is perceived by the market relative to its competitors. Who is it for? What problem(s) does it solve? How is it better? It’s high-level and strategic.

Messaging turns the company’s positioning into narratives and statements to use in copy, sales material, and advertising. It’s specific and operational.

For example:

Positioning: “Our app is the easiest way for busy parents to organize their kids’ schedules, standing out for its intuitive design and automatic reminders.”
Messaging: “Effortlessly manage your kids’ schedules with our user-friendly app. Save time and never miss an event with automatic reminders. Trusted by thousands of busy parents.

A basic messaging and positioning framework is the Value Proposition Canvas:

Define Jobs (Goals), pains (frustrations) and gains (desired outcomes).
Outline the product / feature you offer, pain relievers (how it alleviates frustrations) and gain creators (how it delivers expected outcomes).
Connect each pain with a pain reliever and each gain with a gain creator.
Share your canvas with real customers to confirm alignment with their needs and refine it if necessary.

The Jobs To Be Done is a good alternative for horizontal products that have many use cases (think: Notion)

Identify the focus market (example: software buyers)
Map all jobs out through brainstorming, user surveys, or keyword research
Group the jobs
Create job statements
Prioritize opportunities depending on how well they're served at the moment

These frameworks can literally be spreadsheets with a column for every factor. Don’t overcomplicate it or think you need a fancy tool to build messaging and positioning.

SEOs can use positioning to identify core topics and keywords within them, and messaging to drive content angles (eg “how to do {use case} with {product}”).

Somehow we focused all our energies on rankings/traffic/audience building to create this demand channel, and not enough on the things we’d typically do in a demand channel: share our brand, get our messaging out there, get people excited about what we do. In other words: actually advertise the product. - Blake Thorne

Bringing Product Marketing and SEO closer together

Product marketing and SEO complement each other by sharing insights like search volume or customer research and approaches like positioning or messaging. But most companies stand in their own way by keeping the respective teams siloed. Shared metrics, i.e. goaling two teams by the same numbers, are the crowbar to break the silos up.

3 actionable and comprehensive metrics to share:

Branded search volume & traffic from branded keywords
Customer sentiment (qualitative feedback, NPS, brand sentiment / recall)
Pipeline contribution (influence on leads and conversions)

The metric mix reflects the whole “funnel” or user journey, can be influenced by both teams, and is actionable.

The benefit for companies that get this right is two teams that are more effective and impactful. SEO teams have another way to not just drive more and better organic traffic, but to evaluate their impact from a brand perspective (customer sentiment). Instead of stopping at traffic or obsessing over rankings that are less and less valuable, impact on customer sentiment and pipeline over refuge for a changing SEO landscape.

The question is how to convince leadership to give it a shot.Test into it. Try improving a few product landing pages together, whether you’re in SaaS or e-commerce and measure the impact on shared metrics.

SEO and product marketing are not exempt from the AI disruption. Maybe they have belonged together all along, but the AI tech shift offers an opportunity to run in a new formation and bring SEO and product marketing together.

Brand/product marketing focuses on aligning messaging with customer emotions, behavior and needs, while SEO focuses on visibility. SEOs can elevate their impact by considering how the brand’s narrative fits into the customer journey—moving beyond keywords to a deeper connection with the audience. - Dirk Schart